• DOI:10.1038/356704A0
• Corpus ID: 4350045

First discovery of monotremes in South America

@article{Pascual1992FirstDO,
  title={First discovery of monotremes in South America},
  author={Rosendo Pascual and Michael Archer and Edgardo Ortiz Jaureguizar and Jos{\'e} L Prado and Henk Godthelp and Suzanne J. Hand},
  journal={Nature},
  year={1992},
  volume={356},
  pages={704-706}
}

• R. Pascual, M. Archer, +3 authors S. Hand
• Published 1 April 1992
• Geography, Environmental Science
• Nature

UNTIL now, the egg-laying monotremes were only known from the Australian continent, where they have lived since the early Cretaceous period to the present1. Here we report the first monotreme from outside the Australian continent, an ornithorhyn-chid, from sediments of late early Palaeocene age in Patagonia, southern Argentina. This discovery demonstrates the Gondwanan nature of monotremes and supports the hypothesis that the Patagonian Terrane of southern South America had a biotic history distinct from that of the rest of the continent.